Countries around the world work to help patients and take precautions to prevent the disease from spreading.

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Countries around the world work to help patients and take precautions to prevent the disease from spreading.

Aug. 16, 2014People watch as a crowd protests before entering the grounds of an Ebola isolation center in Monrovia, Liberia. A mob of several hundred people chanting, “No Ebola in West Point,” opened the gates and took out the patients, many saying that the epidemic is a hoax. Just moments before, they drove away a burial team that had tried to take away the bodies of four deceased residents. The isolation center, a closed primary school originally built by USAID, was being used by the Liberian Health Ministry to temporarily isolate people suspected of carrying the virus.John Moore/Getty Images

She’s asked people to pray and fast. Religious leaders would also pray for health care workers and “against any form of witchcraft activity used to spread Ebola virus,” she said.

“We are calling on all Liberians to join in this time of true national repentance and prayer against the Ebola virus,” said priest Jervis Witherspoon, spiritual adviser to Johnson, according to Agence France-Presse. “We believe, in accordance to the scripture, that God will hear our prayer, forgive our sins and heal the land.”

Those treating the infected are becoming infected themselves — and walking off the job.

“People are scared. People are traumatized,” Lewis Brown, Liberia’s information minister, told the Wall Street Journal. “When you see your colleagues, your co-workers succumb to the disease… the first reaction is for people to walk away.”

A Liberian woman weeps over the death of a relative from Ebola in the Banjor Community on the outskirts of Monrovia, Liberia, on Aug. 6, 2014. (AHMED JALLANZO/EPA)

The hardest hit areas — Kenema, a diamond trading hub, and Kailahan — are totally locked down. Almost a million people live there. “No one knew we would be cut off like this,” Abu Bakhar Shaw, a shop owner in downtown Kenema told Newsweek. Cars line up at checkpoints, but can’t get out.

A hospital in Kenema, an epicenter of the infection, stands empty. “Don’t touch the walls!” warned a Western medical technician. “Totally infected.” People are afraid to die at the hospital — they see it as a death trap, the New York Times reported. Instead they are dying in the community, five or six per day, increasing the risk the infection will spread.